


Handcuffs, Lies and Videotape

by sheron



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Awkwardness, Canon Compliant, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fandom Stocking 2016, Friendship, Gen, Handcuffed Together, Handcuffs, Lies, Post-Season/Series 02, Post-Season/Series Finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-15
Updated: 2017-01-15
Packaged: 2018-09-11 04:45:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8954146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheron/pseuds/sheron
Summary: Summary: It's just a typical day at the SSR when Peggy and Jack end up running afoul of another one of Howard Stark's inventions.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pechika](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pechika/gifts).



> Written for Pipilj at the Fandom Stocking's challenge. (Also filling the 'exhaustion' hc_bingo square.)

 

**Daniel**

"And _how_ exactly did you two manage this?"

Peggy physically turned her head away, looking put out. Jack for his part, had been staring at the opposite wall the entire time, and only snorted unhelpfully. The two of them sat in the separate chairs across the desk in Daniel's office, refusing to look at each other.

Their cuffed wrists hung loosely between their two chairs, the gleaming thread of the chain allowing only a few inches of separation for their hands. Jack's left hand looked relaxed where it hung off the cuff around his wrist, a small blinking blue light on the cuff indicating some kind of inner mechanism or machinery; Peggy's right hand was clenched in a fist that strained the chain linking them together.

His chair creaked as Daniel leaned forward on his desk. "Peggy? Jack? You can't want to remain stuck like this."

"Want?" Peggy's eyes flashed with ire. "Believe me, it's the last thing either of us want. Unfortunately, the lab has thus far found no way to remove the cuffs short of cutting our hands off."

Jack slowly rotated his head to look at her. "And your buddy Stark is A.W.O.L."

"Yes," Peggy said succinctly, obviously working to keep her tempter in check. "Last I'd heard of the man he was setting off into the Peruvian wilderness with Jason again, something about subatomic particles. We won't be able to reach him for weeks."

"Have the lab guys tried drilling through it?" Daniel asked hopefully.

"They have tried drilling, cutting, sawing, nothing works. We just came from there. Our tools simply do not cut through a Vibranium alloy." Peggy rolled her eyes. "Howard's engineering."

"That man is a menace," Jack added.

"And you think the original purpose of this device is...?"

Peggy cleared her throat, flushing slightly. "Howard is fond of ...experimentation. We found...films." She shuddered.

"Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be a key and we don't know the safe word," Jack added.

"Ah," Daniel said, diplomatically. "...Wait, films? How long have you two been stuck like this?"

"Since last night," Jack said, his posture so singularly casual and relaxed that Daniel knew immediately he was covering his real feelings on the matter. "After it became apparent that regular means of removal won't work, we went through Starks' room with a fine-toothed comb and found some...materials."

"Films that Howard has recorded around the device and its intended usage," Peggy nodded, her flush not receding. "Through our _research_ , it became apparent that the device unlocks through a particular voice command, but Howard wasn't kind enough to specify it in any of the journals we've been able to find."

"So you two..." Daniel looked between Jack and Peggy with dawning horror.

"Sousa, we had to wade through hours of 'research' that makes me want to bleach my brains out. I don't know about Carter, but I don't want to talk about it."

"Yes," Peggy said, shifting uncomfortably in her chair. "Let's focus on finding a solution shall we?" She lifted her cuffed hand higher, lifting Jack's hand along with it where it dangled loosely. "We cannot remain like this. For one, it is terribly uncomfortable."

"Yeah..." Daniel's mind ran through the gamut of everything they had to have done, now that he knew they'd been cuffed together like this ― he glanced at the clock, it was almost noon ― for over twelve hours. He didn't want to imagine what bathroom breaks had been like. Even if both Peggy and Jack could be professional about that stuff, having both served, being stuck in close confines still put a strain on any relationship. Daniel glanced between the two. In fact, he was surprised they'd managed to remain civil, both not being known for holding their tempers very well. "You could have called me last night."

"We thought we had it handled," Peggy said quickly, which spelled out their desire to avoid anyone finding out about their predicament for as long as possible. Her voice softened, "I'm sorry we didn't call you, Daniel. We had assumed it was a very temporary obstacle."

"But it's not." _There_ was the first glimpse of Jack's temper, in the curt snippy tone, curtailed quickly as he pressed his lips together before biting out with precarious calm, "We should be down at the lab instead of chit-chatting."

Peggy turned to him. "You heard Dr. Samberly, they're doing everything they can. This steel alloy has the rare property of being virtually indestructible. Short of removing our hands, there's little they can do."

"That's starting to sound more and more like a viable option."

Peggy ignored Jack's griping. "What we should be focusing on is finding the safe word."

"How?" Jack said. "It would take days to go through every word in the Oxford dictionary, and we don't know if inflection matters or if the safe word is even in English. It could be a made up word for all we know. It could be a sentence. It could be tuned to Stark's voice."

Daniel looked between the two of them. They were both pale, despite the high splotches of color on their faces, and clearly hadn't slept a wink.

"Have you guys eaten since yesterday?" Daniel said. Peggy's stomach growled in answer. Jack smirked at that.

"I'm going to order some take-out lunch, and we'll brainstorm how to free you."  


 

* * *

 

**Peggy**

Lunch started out ignobly with Jack and Peggy nearly overturning the food containers with their cuffed hands as they tried to navigate this new activity together, but ended with them learning to coordinate their actions relatively quickly under the motivation of their first meal in over twelve hours. Peggy thought she had it harder by far. With her right-arm being in the cuff attached to Jack's hand she had to do everything left-handed; it wasn't unlike that time she'd been shot in the right shoulder in the war, and the memory brought with it an unwelcome wistfulness.

Jack's current idea was that breaking the fingers of his hand to get it through the cuff was doable, something Peggy vigorously protested and which put Daniel off his lunch entirely.

"Well, short of locking us in a room with an English dictionary for a few days, I don't see any other alternative," Jack said, in between the pizza bites.

"In that case I vote for a room with an English dictionary," Daniel put in quickly. "We'll keep that option as a last resort and I'll have someone try to reach Stark's lab in Peru."

"Is it fair to tie up government resources like that?" Peggy said, always sensitive to how her position was perceived by others in the office.

"I'll keep dialing myself, if I have to," Daniel assured her. "I can't let two top agents remain out of commission for too long."

Peggy smiled warmly at his offer, but Jack felt the need to correct him. " _One_ agent. We both know I'm doing squat these days."

Peggy and Daniel exchanged an uncomfortable glance. Even though Jack looked at ease as he sat in the chair, he was less than a month out of the hospital for an injury that could have been fatal. He was off active duty and forcibly enjoying California's sunshine, which was deemed better for his lungs than the damp, cold summer of New York. Jack was temporarily staying at Howard's mansion, after being released out of the hospital, the charm of impersonal hotels now lost on all of them entirely. Sharing a roof with the Jarvises and Peggy was a strenuous arrangement at best, and Jack oscillated between acting glibly indifferent and manically determined to get back into shape so he could resume his New York post and hunt for the man who'd tried to kill him. The healing progress could only go so fast though, no matter how much Jack pushed himself. More than once, Peggy had caught him nursing a finger's worth of hard liquor in a glass on evenings after a particularly brutal day. Sometimes she joined him.

Still, despite their newfound ability to tolerate one another ― Peggy hesitated to call it friendship, although she'd done less for people she did call friends in the past ― the current situation which forced them into close proximity twenty-four hours a day was quickly wearing. Even without Jack suggesting bodily harm as an option.

"I suggest we avail ourselves of one of the interrogation rooms and get started on the Oxford dictionary." Peggy glared at nobody in particular. "I'd like to shower this evening. _Alone_."

"Sure you wouldn't like Sousa to join you?" Jack quipped.

"Ha. Ha." Yet Daniel flushed, so Peggy knew Jack's remark had landed. She tried not to think too hard about any of that now; the thought of intimacy brought memories of last night's research into Howard's activities to the forefront of her brain. Jack and Peggy had only had to watch a small portion of the films, but they'd had to _listen_ to the entire reel in case Howard issued the safe word. Like Jack, she wished she could wipe her mind of the experience. It was bad enough to listen to the man she called a friend getting it on with several girls, in several adventurous positions, doing it with Jack in the same room had been akin to torture. 

"If we don't get this off, you're going to find out," Peggy snapped to Jack, who recoiled with exaggerated horror, but in retrospect that might have been the comment that put him off the sexual innuendo jokes for the rest of the day.

The two of them spent the day locked in an interrogation room together, taking turns: one person going through Howard's journals for scraps of information on the properties of Vibranium, the other reading the Oxford dictionary aloud. After about eight hours of that, Peggy was warming up to the idea of breaking some fingers, she just wasn't sure whose. The lab guys had sent an update on their progress (lack there of) before heading home for the night after a hard day's work. 

Jack, looking pale and noticeably flagging, insisted they keep going with the research for a full hour after Peggy had originally suggested a break for the night, having seen him struggling. By nine in the evening, Daniel threw the two of them out of the office. Jack was staggering a bit as they walked out to the street, although he tried hard not to let it show.

"Do you want me to come with you?" Daniel asked Peggy quietly out on the street. 

She shook her head. "This will be awkward enough without witnesses."

Daniel kissed her cheek before letting go and getting into his own car to drive home. Peggy was the only choice to drive their car to Howard's, due to the way they were cuffed together with Jack on her right-hand side. Climbing into her seat had been its own adventure, but Jack couldn't contort himself too much in the chest area due to his healing injury so the task fell entirely to Peggy to clamber over the middle division, while Jack slid into the passenger seat in her wake. (He was so exhausted that he didn't even seem to notice Peggy nearly face-planting the wheel when her silk scarf had gotten accidentally caught on the driving stick. If he had, Peggy knew he would have taken a moment to comment on it.)

Mr. Jarvis was out in Peru, no doubt wondering at his lot in life, but Ana had greeted them at the house with genial aplomb and an invitation to dinner. Peggy had called ahead and a room was already set up for them with a king-sized bed and what they called Hollywood-style blankets, where a set of pillows had been placed down the middle to divide it into two halves. On no sleep in forty hours, the large bed looked like heaven even if she was going to be sharing it.

After they ate, with Jack propping his chin on an elbow, looking like he was staying awake through sheer effort of will, the matter of showering came up again. Peggy glanced uncertainly at the white marble shower, after they brushed their teeth side-by-side in the convenient gold-plated double sinks of the adjoining bathroom.

"I swear to God, I do not care what you do as long as you do it quickly," Jack muttered. He went to sit on the closed lid of the toilet, the Oxford dictionary still in hand. While Peggy washed up quickly behind the thick beige curtain, cuffed hand stretched out in the break between the shower curtain and the white-marble wall, Jack went through another page or two of English words to no avail. Her jacket and blouse had to remain hanging off the cuff of her dry hand, since she wasn't cutting up her clothes just to get out of them. After she turned off the water, Jack stretched out a fluffy white tower through the curtain gap, nose still planted in the book. Peggy wasn't sure how much attention he was still paying to the words, his monotone had trailed off and in the silence of the bathroom, Peggy felt like every noise she made revealed too much as she quickly toweled off. She pulled the undergarments, blouse and the jacket back on and put on her pants while still in the bath, wishing for a comfortable set of night garments instead, before tugging the curtain open.

"Would you like a turn?"

Jack glanced blearily up at her. Slack-jawed and wane in the face, he looked incredibly tired. Peggy knew it was an artifact of his injury making great demands on his energy to heal, and her eyes fell to his chest on the right side, where bandages still covered the area of the terrible shooting scar. "Do you need help changing the bandages?"

Jack sort of shrugged his left shoulder, making the chain on their cuff jiggle. "Tomorrow," he said. Peggy waited while he took care of business, studiously reading English words aloud, and they both gratefully went towards the bed. Jack couldn't sleep in a horizontal position, having to set up the pillows to keep himself somewhat upright, so his ribs didn't have to lift up against gravity like they would when lying flat. Luckily there was no shortage of fluffy down pillows or thousand-thread count cotton comforters at Howard's place, the surrounding opulence easing the edge of their situation a bit. Peggy thought Jack was asleep as soon as his head hit the pillows, their cuffed hands stretched out across the pillow barrier separating the two sides of the bed. She lay awake for only a few minutes longer herself.

Peggy was a heavy sleeper ― her mum used to say she would sleep through the Blitz if she wasn't careful ― but even she could hardly avoid waking when the cuff on her right wrist jerked lightly in the middle of the night.

"Jack?" she called immediately.

He pretended to be asleep for another minute, before saying, softly. "Go back to sleep."

She lay in the darkness for a minute, listening to his shaky breaths. "Nightmares?" she whispered into the absolute darkness.

"It's nothing. Go back to sleep, Carter." The use of her last name was a fairly good cue he wasn't in the sharing mood. Peggy turned to find a new position, and tried to go back to sleep, but she could hear him shifting subtly on the other side of the bed for the rest of the night, trying not to wake her. He never fell back asleep.

"Does that happen often?" she queried in the morning, crawling over to his side so he could get up more easily. Mornings with a chest injury were enough to make grown men cry, although in Jack's case they just made him press his lips together as he tried to ride out the excruciating pain of the first movement of the muscles that had relaxed for the night.

Eventually, he was sitting down on the side of the bed, Peggy at his side, and he finally had the breath to respond. "God, I hope you and Sousa procreate soon, so you can mother someone who needs it for a change."

"Jack, you're recovering from an injury―"

"Thanks, I hadn't noticed."

"―and you're having nightmares."

"They're nightmares of being stuck like this forever, with you nagging at me."

Peggy threw up her hands (not literally, since they were, indeed, still cuffed together) and they went on with the morning rituals in taciturn silence. It wasn't any less awkward than before, but Jack seemed to be too tired and downcast to make any pointed comments, and Peggy spent most of the morning turning his circumstance over in her head. It was likely his nightmares were the result of the healing injury paining him in sleep, or even the mind's way of dealing with the way he'd been ambushed and shot, while alone in a hotel. But it could also be other things. Their lives hadn't been trouble-free prior to that, and Peggy herself had spent several nights in cold sweat, remembering the way Daniel had almost been forever lost to her due to the Zero Matter rift. Clearly, she wasn't going to get Jack to talk, and a part of her wondered why this bothered her. They were cuffed together, not married. Wistfully, Peggy thought about how much easier it would have been if the person on the other end of the cuff had been Daniel.

After a quiet breakfast ― Ana glanced between the two of them numerous times, but didn't comment ― both of them wanted to jump back into looking for solutions for their predicament, but there were still bandages to be taken care of. Peggy helped unwrap the wound, keeping her face expressionless as she did so. The skin was closing up and didn't need packing, which was a relief. After, it was her turn to sit on the closed lid of the toilet, stoically reciting English words while Jack cleaned himself off behind the shower's closed curtain. Once he was done and dressed up to the waist again, she helped him reapply the bandages. They didn't talk aside from short words like, "here" and "hold this", and the whole process went by in a surprisingly painless fashion, figuratively speaking. After, he dressed again in the same undershirt and pulled the slightly wrinkled white office shirt from the day before back on.

She wasn't a vain person, but applying makeup one-handed while Jack Thompson gave her critical looks from where he leaned against a nearby wall was a low-light of the morning. Peggy hadn't pinned her hair up the night before, and was relying on its natural curliness to keep shape. Jack slicked his hair back with pomade. For a moment, both of them stood in front of the wall-width mirror, considering their reflection.

"I think this is what arranged marriages are like," Jack said unexpectedly.

They met each other's eyes in the mirror, and after a moment evaluating how the other felt about that statement, broke into smiles they couldn't contain before turning away and resuming their morning tasks. Peggy thought there were worse people than Thompson to be stuck with: at least the man had a sense of humour.  


 

* * *

 

**Jack**

There was nobody else Jack wanted to be cuffed to less than Peggy Carter. Alright, maybe that was an exaggeration (at least the woman had a sense of humour), but it felt close enough to the truth by the time afternoon rolled about. Jack was about ready to jump out of his skin. Which looked to be about the only way he could get out of this handcuff situation. 

The thing about being cuffed to Peggy was that he might as well have been cuffed to Sousa as well. The man showed up first thing after breakfast, to kiss his girl and make disappointed faces over learning they hadn't managed to uncuff themselves. There was no point in heading to the SSR until the scientists found something that could help, so instead they commandeered a living room in Stark's house for their purposes. Since then, Sousa had taken over reading from the dictionary at the letter M, sitting on the leather couch, while Peggy sat on the other end, leafing through the Howard's science notes on Vibranium (pulled from the Captain America's file, which just figured) her brow furrowed, face growing more vexed by the minute. 

Jack, left with nothing to do but picture the end of his days with an unwilling, irritable Carter hanging off his wrist, longing to be elsewhere, opened up a new bottle of bourbon. Stark was a menace, but he had good alcohol. Jack had offered it to them only to get distracted refusals, and then Peggy took her shoes off and stuck her feet into Daniel's lap, shifting to find a more comfortable spot, half-lying on the couch, her right hand still hanging loosely in Jack's direction where he sat in a nearby armchair. Daniel had glanced at Peggy, smiled ruefully, and was now massaging her ankles through the stockings while he read. It was all fine for Peggy and Daniel, who had something to do, but sitting there with the two of them buried in their work, with nearly identical expressions of concentration on their little faces, Jack had time to remember how very alone he was.

Which is why he didn't let himself do this. Normally, he would have gone for a run or tried to exercise to wipe his mind clean of such thoughts. At worst he would have pestered Sousa for some casework to occupy himself with. He'd have read a book, or went driving along the winding L.A. roads and perhaps made fun of the local population for their fondness of garish fashion and bizarre food choices, _something_. Because there was nothing like having the artificial bond of handcuffs to illustrate all the bonds of close human companionship that he wasn't a part of. Peggy and Daniel didn't need handcuffs to tie them together, they exuded a connection just being in the same room. Jack didn't do maudlin well, and being stuck in the four walls, no matter how tastefully decorated, literally cuffed to the only people who could tell with an alarmingly high accuracy when he was lying to them, meant that he had to put twice the effort into looking like he had everything under control.

"Stop fidgeting," Peggy said in a throwaway fashion, without looking up from the journals. Like he was an afterthought. Jack didn't care that Daniel Sousa was apparently the man of her dreams, or that she was perfectly in her element solving yet another mystery, no matter how banal. (And seriously, with the amount of trouble Stark brought everyone they should start paying the guy to stop inventing. Nothing he'd done after the whole deal with Captain America was without some terrible side-effect that just waited to explode in all their faces at the worst possible moment.) But the point was, Peggy had slid into the cuff-solving virtuoso role with astonishing ease and with her typical pragmatic approach, then Daniel joined her at the hip like he'd always been there, and now both of them gave little thought to Jack, expecting him to just know how he fit into this little construction. And he didn't.

The worst part, the most humiliating part that he wouldn't admit under the pain of death was that the past forty or so hours weren't nearly as wretched as he'd expected them to be. Sure there was the mortifying inconvenience of bathroom breaks, and that whole experience watching Howard on film which he was never mentioning aloud again, but that aside it'd been nice to have someone at his side who had grown attuned to the way he moved, who listened, who could compensate when Jack needed it and who understood him almost at half a breath. That night he'd had nightmares for the first time in a long while because he'd felt safe. Ironically, the sudden release from the typical stress allowed his subconsciousness to come up for air. The arranged marriage comment had been meant as a joke, but as Jack was turning it over in his head it felt less and less amusing. Someday soon, Sousa was going to man-up and ask Carter to join him in holy matrimony ― which: more power to them ― and they'd swan off into their sunset, either into glorious, highly-decorated careers or into renegade outlaws (because Peggy never did anything by half) and Jack would be left behind. He already felt slightly out of step with the two of them: exchanging private little glances, inside jokes that he had no way of deciphering and wasn't going to think about because honestly, those two deserved each other and every headache that followed. And every moment of human connection between them.

Not. That. He. Cared.

"It's very distracting when you do that." Peggy finally looked up from the journals, frowning at him. Jack realized that he'd been drumming the fingers of his left, cuffed, hand on the leather side of the armchair. Like a child, he immediately wanted to keep doing it to see what would happen, but he forced himself to stop. The resulting pitying looks wouldn't be worth it, but it did just meant that he had no outlet whatsoever. The best thing was probably to sit there quietly, drinking, until the urge to say anything passed.

"So I have an idea," Jack said, mouth running almost without any input from his brain. "We buy tickets to Peru, trek to whatever god-forsaken place Stark'd gotten himself to, and beat him to death with these cuffs."

"While satisfying," Peggy said archly, "this plan wouldn't get us any closer to being free."

Jack curled his fingers so he wouldn't keep drumming out a nervous beat against the armrest. He was perhaps a little tense because he wanted to snap back that she seemed eager to get rid of him, which would be a bad idea on so many levels. It wasn't even like he _wanted_ to remain cuffed. It was just that he wasn't as eager to go back to normal as he'd expected to be.

Daniel had paused in his recital of dictionary words and his glance at Jack was a touch too candid. Pissed off at himself for letting anything show, Jack met his eyes blandly and dared him to look away first.

"I see we're progressing cheerfully into the homicidal rage portion of this affair," Daniel said carefully. "Maybe it's time we took a break. Lunch?"

Jack didn't so much jump out of the armchair as he slid smoothly to his feet, tugging at the cuff to get Peggy going. She sighed, and pulled her feet off Daniel's lap and into her pretty little black heeled pumps.

"I could eat," she said, rolling her shoulders to stretch a little. She was honest like that.

Jack thought suddenly about how he could also be honest with them. Now was the time to say everything he'd been turning over in his head for the past week, even before the silly cuffs had brought what they had into a sharp relief. He'd been thinking about it even since he'd gotten out of the hospital and been forced, under duress, to spend time with the two of them. How he'd grown...attached. How he'd grown tired of pretending he didn't give a damn. How he thought, maybe, his life could take on a different meaning with the two of them in it.

So of course he said, instead, "Let's not stay in. Let's go to a classy joint and see what their Hollywood sensibilities make of us." He lifted his left wrist, along with Peggy's, jiggling it a little, laughing at the synchronized eye-roll he got from both of them. "We can pretend Peggy has me under arrest."

"Let's definitely do that, Jack." Sousa shook his head, despairing. "You're a genius."

The blue light on the cuff blinked once and turned off, the cuffs unlocking seamlessly from their wrists and falling to the floor with a clang.

"Oh. You are joking," Peggy said softly.

Jack groaned and briefly covered his face with his palm.

The three of them stood silent over the cuffs lying innocuously on the dark-wood floor. Jack wasn't going to pick them up: he felt irrationally like he was looking at a snake that could wind its way around his wrist again. At his side, Peggy was rotating her hand to get the kinks out.

"How does that even come up in―" Daniel started.

"Abort! Abort!" Jack said quickly, wincing at the thought.

Only Howard Stark.

"Well," Peggy said brightly after a moment. "I'm glad that's over."

No part of Jack cared that she and Sousa would start their swanning off any second now. Daniel had already gone to grab his dark blue jacket off the back of the couch, pulling it on and jiggling the car keys. He gave Peggy this long look, like he was picturing all the ways they fit together, and how he could simply call her and she'd come to his side, because she wanted to, and how satisfying that probably was. 

And Jack wasn't going to think of, ever, not even for another second, how he knew to read that look. But he was at least honest enough to ask:

"So, is lunch off the table?"

Peggy peered at him like he was crazy. Daniel made a come-hither motion with his fingers. "I'm driving," he only said, like it was a done deal and all, turning to go outside.

Peggy linked a hand around Jack's elbow and tugged him forward, to fall in stride at Daniel's side. She linked her other hand through Daniel's elbow.

The handcuffs lay forgotten on the floor.

 

**Fin.**

 

**Author's Note:**

> Notes: So Howard had some Vibranium left over... The science of speech recognition was already being worked on in 1932 in our universe, so I figured in MCU and their hovering cars, Howard Stark is ahead of the curve as usual. Similarly, the history of videotapes starts in the early 1950s, but if anyone would be the first to make a sex tape, it would be Howard. Thank you for reading!


End file.
